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Navarro was next great Latin lover after Rudolph Valentino. The film starred matinee idol Francis Bushman as the wicked Messala, while Mexican actor Ramon Navarro played Judah. The young Wyler had served as an assistant director on those scenes. Chariots literally seem to run right over the camera. It had, well, an epic sea battle and an awesome chariot race, where the cinematography stunned the audience. It was an ambitious project by the newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. You see, the first great Ben-Hur was a classic silent film that appeared in 1925. Wyler’s film has all that, but it also recycled a thrilling story to guarantee success. Orgies of color, enormous new aspect ratios, star-studded casts and thrilling plots were marshaled to fight back against television’s drain on the box office. The great film epics of the late 50s and 60s were deliberately oversized and spectacular to draw audiences away from their black and white boxes. The truth is Wyler’s film was itself a remake, done at a time when the movies were at war with television. So was the television remake just trying to piggyback on the Wyler film’s success? The Wyler film had spectacular effects: a great sea battle with men in loincloths, and a thrilling chariot race, the climactic moment of Judah’s revenge over his rival, Messala.
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The film dominated the Academy Awards, winning 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. He played the passionate Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish hero caught up in a thrilling tale of revenge and redemption in Roman times. But why remake it? Didn’t William Wyler’s epic 1959 film tell the story well enough? That film starred Charlton Heston in his prime. It was a 4-hour miniseries for television. The Honors College at the University of Houston presents this program about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.Ī few years ago, a Canadian production company did a remake of Ben-Hur.